Chicagoans from Ukraine stand with homeland

Some return to help resist Russia, heal the suffering, document stories

March 13, 2014|By Angie Leventis Lourgos, Tribune reporter

The Rev. Mykola Buryadnyk, a pastor at St. Joseph the Betrothed Ukrainian Catholic Church on Chicago's Far Northwest Side, returned March 2 from a trip to Ukraine, where he went from bed to bed at hospitals ministering to the wounded as a chaplain. Buryadnyk is preparing to interview to become a naturalized U.S. citizen this month. He’s a bit conflicted about losing his Ukrainian citizenship but says he’s proud of his adopted country for backing Ukraine. For now, the priest plans to work stateside to talk to government officials here, raise money to send to Ukrainian hospitals and pray for everyone back home. “We pray every day” that a full war doesn’t break out, Buryadnyk said. (Jose M. Osorio, Tribune photo)

Relatives tried to discourage Chicago native George Sajewych from joining the protests at the Maidan in Ukraine, the homeland his parents fled after World War II.

Their fears were realized Feb. 18 when Sajewych was beaten by police near the parliament building in Kiev, he said, suffering a concussion, a broken arm and much bruising. The 68-year-old retiree-turned-activist said he was recently released from the hospital and is healing well, but he has no plans to permanently return to the United States anytime soon.

"Arriving here I told myself that I would stay until the end," Sajewych said in an email from Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. "The Maidan revolution triumphed, but now Ukraine faces an even deadlier threat — Russia's occupation of Crimea, which, I am convinced, is but the first step in (President Vladimir) Putin's plan to enslave all of Ukraine. I have to stay, to do my part."

While Putin has said his nation was acting to protect ethnic Russians in the Crimean Peninsula, many Ukrainian-Americans in the Chicago area say they fear for their ancestral home.

Sajewych is among the locals who have recently gone back, despite the danger and turmoil, to help keep Ukraine free and independent.

A priest and Ukrainian immigrant on the Far Northwest Side served as a chaplain to Kiev's wounded earlier this month, and he was among the clerics who formed a human shield to protect protesters from military and police forces there in mid-December. A DePaul University student filmmaker, a third-generation Ukrainian, documented the stories of protesters there in December and is scheduled to return Saturday.

The U.S. State Department warns against nonessential travel to Ukraine.

Relatives of Sajewych — a former producer for the international public broadcast of the U.S. government, Voice of America — said they worry about him every day he is in Kiev.

His brother Oleh Sajewych, 67, who lives in Chicago's Ukrainian Village neighborhood, said their parents went to a refugee camp in Germany after World War II and later came to the United States to escape the grip of the Red Army and create a better life for their children. His sister Lida Ryndyk, 62, of Jefferson Park, said she spent much of her life focused on healing and forgiveness, trying to move past the suffering and sorrow her parents left behind.

"But after seeing how the struggle of the people of Ukraine and the exposure of the corrupt government was finally noticed by the world … I see my brother as a hero," Ryndyk said. "Even though we would like to see him home, we try to support him in a positive way."

'We pray every day'

The Rev. Mykola Buryadnyk remembers that his father did a strange thing on Aug. 24, 1991, in Ukraine.

He placed the family's television on the sill of an open window facing the street and turned up the volume as loud as it would go, so all passers-by could hear the parliament proclaim Ukraine's independence.

Buryadnyk was in eighth grade in Modrychi, a village in western Ukraine, persecuted at school because he was the son of a priest. He vividly recalls being forced by a teacher to stare at a statue of fallen Soviet soldiers on Easter Sunday. Independence took time, he said, but slowly Ukrainians regained their culture, their history and their freedom to worship.

Now the first generation raised in a free Ukraine isn't willing to let go, said Buryadnyk, a pastor at St. Joseph the Betrothed Ukrainian Catholic Church on Chicago's Far Northwest Side.

He returned March 2 from his latest trip to Ukraine, where he went from bed to bed at hospitals ministering to the wounded as a chaplain. He said he was sorrowful to see the sea of flowers and candles mourning the dead and wounded at the Maidan, also known as Independence Square.

"There are so many people who were not wounded physically but who have seen people wounded and killed," said Buryadnyk, adding that many in his country are hesitant to talk to a therapist or psychologist. "But they will accept a priest. We wouldn't wait for them to come to us. We would walk through the camps and talk to them about what they've seen."

Buryadnyk is preparing to interview to become a naturalized U.S. citizen this month. He's a bit conflicted about losing his Ukrainian citizenship but says he's proud of his adopted country for backing Ukraine.

For now, the priest plans to work stateside to talk to government officials here, raise money to send to Ukrainian hospitals and pray for everyone back home.

"We pray every day" that a full war doesn't break out, Buryadnyk said.

Filming for posterity

Julian Hayda's grandparents didn't like to talk about life back in the old country.

They were taken by the Nazis to work camps during World War II and didn't have a home to return to after the war's end, when they immigrated to the United States.

"I'm an American," he said his grandmother likes to say. "Why am I an American? Because America lets me be a Ukrainian."